The Fruits of the Spirit and of Love of the Sacred Heart, 28th Wednesday (II), October 16, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
October 16, 2024
Gal 5:18-25, Ps 1, Lk 11:42-46

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we come to the end of our reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and he summarizes everything he’s been saying about the contrast between living while imagining one is saved by the law and external deeds versus living to be saved by God through his grace received and responded to with faith overflowing in love. He does so in describing two totally divergent sets of effects. One he calls the “works of the flesh,” because this is what living focused on the “works of law” produces and is entirely the production of the individual; and the other is called the “fruit of the Spirit,” which like natural fruit is made, requires the cooperation between the one who sows a seed (in this case, God the Holy Spirit) and the one who receives it (in this case, us). The contrast couldn’t be greater. Often when we think of the “works of the flesh” we think first of those living under the three fold concupiscence of the lust of the eyes (materialism), lust of the flesh (carnal sensuality) and the pride of life (a desire for control and dominion). But St. Paul makes clear in context that living according to the works of the law, rather than in communion with the Legislator, can produce these same works of the flesh. He says that the works of the flesh are “obvious”: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” He says that those who do such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” not so much because they’ll be punished but because they won’t be interested in and receptive to God’s kingdom after having made other things their god.
• In the Gospel, Jesus pronounces a series of “woes” (indications of a cursed life)  to those Scribes and Pharisees who, even though they thought they were living the way God wanted them to live were living ultimately according to the flesh. Unless they converted, he said, they’d be doomed, because while they were paying tithes on the smallest of garden herbs they were “pay[ing] no attention to judgment and to love for God.” They focus on the most conspicuous seats and the greetings of others, but are spiritually dead, “like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” To use the words of today’s Psalm, they’re ultimately like the “chaff that the wind drives away.” They impose burdens on others hard to carry, Jesus says, without lifting a finger to help them, the exact opposite of a Good Samaritan. We see the works of the flesh in the way they attacked Jesus and others he had come to save. We see their idolatry of the law. We witness their immorality, hatred, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of anger, acts of selfishness and envy in the way they conspired to have Jesus framed and executed. We see their dissensions and factions in the discussions of the Sanhedrin, to which many of them belonged. On the outside they seemed to be doing the works of God, Jesus was saying, but on the inside they were just doing works of the flesh, refusing to enter the kingdom, and producing only chaff and interior death.
• St. Paul calls the Galatians and all of us Christians to another path. In the Psalm, it’s described as the way of the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on his law day and night,” not as a dry document or as an idol but as a means of growing in love with the Lord who gives us the law to train us to love God and others. Such a person, the Psalm says, is “like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” That’s the person who plants himself in the Holy Spirit, “lives” in him, is “guided” by him,  and “follows” him. This cooperation with God’s grace in faith yields the type of fruit in every season that St. Paul describes: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” That fruit doesn’t happen as a coincidence; it flows from union with God. If we’re aware of God the Holy Spirit working within us, how can we not experience greater love for God and for all those God loves? How we can not experience the joy that is the infallible sign of God’s presence within, a joy that lasts even in the midst of suffering and contradiction, because how can anything compare with the happiness that flows from God’s presence? How can greater awareness and attentive following of God the Holy Spirit not increase our peace? How can it not help us with patience, for isn’t waiting for whatever we need to happen so much easier when we know we’re waiting consciously and prayerfully with God? How can the consciousness of God within not make us more kind and gentle, seeking the other’s good together with the God who loves them and even correcting them out of love, knowing that the Holy Spirit will help us with the words? How can we not be more generous when the Holy Spirit has been generously poured into us as his temple? How can we not grow to trust God more in faith when he entrusts himself to us? How can it not help us with self-mastery over our lower appetites when the Holy Spirit strengthens — literally confirms — us within?
• Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque is someone who showed us how to live according to the Holy Spirit and radiated the fruits of that life in a compelling way. Jesus had said in the Gospel that he would send the Holy Spirit to remind us of everything he taught us and lead us into all truth. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque’s docility to the Holy Spirit prepared her to be a fitting recipient of Jesus’ revelations to her, and through her to the human race, of his Sacred Heart. In this 18-month period in which we are marking the 350th anniversary of Jesus’ appearances to her in Paray-le-Monial France (from December 27, 1673 through June 16, 1675), it is particularly important that we embrace what Jesus said to her about the love beating within his heart for us and the world. In the late 17th century, afflicted by Jansenism, many Christians looked to God as a harsh judge just waiting for an excuse to send us to hell forever, rather than a merciful Father who would sacrifice his only begotten Son in order to save us. Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary to reveal the heart that so much loved men that it exhausted itself for our salvation. He came in a particular way to console her as well, allowing her to experience various difficulties precisely so that she would be more receptive to what Jesus wanted to give. After the death of her father when she was a young girl, Margaret Mary and her mother were abused by in-laws. She suffered because of an ulcer on her leg for five years. She suffered from opposition to her vocation. She suffered from various Visitation nuns inside the convent. But she clung to Jesus on the Cross and Jesus chose her to be his instrument to reveal to us the love of his Sacred Heart. In a series of apparitions, Jesus told St. Margaret Mary that he had exhausted himself out of love for us, but from “most” he received only indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn toward his presence in what he called the “sacrament of love,” the Eucharist. He said he was particularly pained that those consecrated to him treated him in this way.  In response to “most” treating him in the “sacrament of love” with indifference by missing Mass as if it makes no difference, Jesus was communicating that he wanted us to treat him in the Mass as the greatest difference-maker in our life, as our true priority, as the “source and summit” of our existence, the fulcrum of our week and day. In response to “most” who treat him with irreverence, who just go through the motions or who even pray Mass poorly as if it doesn’t matter, he wants us to treat him with deep piety. In contrast to “most” who relate to him with coldness and lack of enthusiasm, who come to Mass as bored and distracted spectators rather than ardent participants, he wants us more passionate about him at the Mass than the most fanatical sports fans are during a successful playoff run. Instead of treating him with scorn, he wants us to relate to him with grateful appreciation. And rather than receiving him sacrilegiously, without being in the state of grace, he wants us to receive him with souls fully intent on holiness and cleansed of sin. Those of us, moreover, who are consecrated to him in baptism (not to mention those consecrated to him in the more intimate form of baptismal consecration called the religious life or consecrated to him in the priesthood) have, in a sense, a duty to make reparation for all of those who treat Jesus poorly. If he feels most keenly the lack of love from those who are consecrated, then how much more consoling will be the love of those who are conscious of their special dedication. The best way we train to do so is by receiving Jesus in the Eucharist with precedence, piety, passion, praise and purity — in short, by treating Jesus as he deserves. Every Eucharist, every celebration of the sacrament of his love, Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, wants to give us a heart transplant. In one of his appearances, Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to take St. John’s place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on his heart and, not only to sense his love, but to share in it. She felt the Lord mystically take her heart, put it within his own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast, so that her heart, like his, might become a “burning furnace of charity.” Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on his as he celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from him his own heart so that we might love God and others as he loves us. The Sacraments are how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!” The Holy Spirit is the one who makes all of this possible.
• Like we see in St. Margaret Mary’s life, the first and greatest way we need to correspond to the Holy Spirit, to let him guide us, live in us so that we may follow him all the way to the Father’s house is here at Mass, where the Holy Spirit comes down to overshadow not just the priest and the altar to transform bread and wine entirely into God the Son in his body, blood, soul and divinity, but seeks to transform us into one body, one spirit of Christ.  It’s here where we encounter the source of our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and, like St. Margaret Mary, are spurred on to holiness. It’s where where the Holy Spirit seeks to reignite a new Pentecost in which, immersed in the love of the Sacred Heart, we take that love out into the world!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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